Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced a multiyear collaboration with Metro Goldwyn Mayer, a media company best known for the production of movies and television programs, to reimagine its core digital distribution platform using the cloud.

Founded in 1924, MGM has one of the world’s largest libraries of digital and physical film content. The company focuses on the production, acquisition, licensing and global distribution of its film and television content across all media platforms.

To track its media supply chain, MGM is migrating its content library and SAP workloads to Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing company and using AWS services to support its content rights and distribution processes. The announcement came during AWS’ re:Invent virtual event that began last week and runs through Dec. 18.

“MGM has one of the world’s deepest libraries of premium film and television content,” said Doug Rousso, executive vice president and chief technology officer of MGM. “And we’re innovating in the cloud to improve how we get this extensive, rich content out to distributors around the world using scalable, microservices-based architectures.”

Traditional media supply chains are highly decentralized and rely on tedious manual processes to distribute to new and existing platforms, making them expensive to maintain.

MGM’s new cloud-based media supply chain using AWS compute will use serverless storage, machine learning and machine learning infrastructure that will spin up and down only when needed to offset costs and increase efficiency to reduce costs.

AWS intends to put a host of tools at MGM’s disposal and automate every step of the supply chain, such as AWS Elemental MediaConvert, which MGM will use to automate more fully the processes for optimizing feature films and television content delivery for any screen.

AWS Lambda, a serverless compute infrastructure, combined with AWS container services will make it easier for MGM to transfer, process and package video for all its media channels on demand without having to procure, plan and run its own infrastructure.

“AWS gives us the flexibility, scalability, reliability and security to deliver premium content to customers through intelligent and automated supply chain solutions,” said Rousso. “Our new cloud-based media supply chain will give us increased visibility into owned content, the ability to better inform our sales teams, and faster processing of licensing deal that will help us deliver more content experiences to viewers and grow new revenue opportunities.”

MGM also has a vast archived log of physical and digitized feature films and television shows that needs to be distributed to current and future customers, partners and consumers. The tagging of that media itself represents an ever-shifting target-rich environment of meaning and category as marketing and culture change intent and expectation.

Also, the launch of technologies such as Google TV and Apple TV, which allow users to use voice recognition to search for their favorite films and television shows or clips within the), means having the ability to search within its content is an appealing benefit for customers.

By applying machine learning services like Amazon Rekognition, an AWS service that adds image recognition and video analysis to applications, MGM can analyze content as well as tag specific video frames with metadata. As a result, consumers can use voice search to find episodes, voice lines, actors and memorable scenes. For MGM’s partners, this will make it easier to license film and television shows for lineups.

Image: MGM